


Fall Registration

by MzMinola



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Gen, Ghosts, Let Erica Say Fuck, One Shot, Road Trips, character processing her own death, liminal spaces
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-20
Updated: 2018-11-20
Packaged: 2019-08-26 09:33:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,413
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16679065
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MzMinola/pseuds/MzMinola
Summary: Erica's ghost journeys away from Beacon Hills.





	Fall Registration

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted on tumblr July 13th 2013.

Erica stares at her corpse slumped in the corner feeling the same angry fascination she’d once watched the video of herself seizing with. Cameras in everyone’s phones, knives in all the smiles, and now she knows what  _still as death_  means. Being sixteen isn’t what she was promised.

 “I should find those little shits and haunt them,” Erica says. Yeah. That’s a great use of the afterlife, making teenage douchebag’s phones glitch. Wait, can she even do that? Nobody had handed her a pamphlet when her body gave up the ghost, so to speak.

“I’ll haunt  _Derek_ ,” she says to no one, and turns away from her corpse. Once outside the janitorial closet though, she finds herself wandering back towards the vault.  She doesn’t glide or float, just walks through the dusty bank, wondering if other people can hear her footsteps.

The answer is no, if Boyd and Cora’s lack of reaction is anything to go by when she walks through the vault door. They’re slumped against one wall, holding hands. Boyd’s still crying, and Cora’s staring into the distance. Erica kneels down, hugs them. Boyd shivers and hunches down more in his jacket and Cora starts rubbing her arms.

“Sorry,” Erica says, but there’s no response, and she shoves herself up again.

Right. Haunting Derek, she should get to that.

~

It’s a long walk from the bank to Derek’s loft, and by the time she gets there it just doesn’t seem  _worth_  it anymore. The alphas are probably gonna wave her body at Derek anyway, the same way they’d dragged her death out in front of Boyd and Cora. And if the story about the fire Cora’d told was true, Derek already had at least eight dead family members. You know,  _loved ones_ , not like Erica.

Her shoulders slump as she glumly looks at the fire escape leading up to the loft. What the hell difference would it make, if she made some  _ooooh_  noises and cold patches? The fucking  _pipework_  probably already did that. Derek was either gonna bite more kids like her or he wasn’t.

Fuck it.

Fuck it fuck it _fuck it._

Fuck Derek for biting her and the alphas for killing her, fuck Isaac for making her wanna stay in the pack and Boyd for convincing her to run,  _fuck_  Derek for not warning them about the alphas. Fuck Stiles for being cute and smart and funny and Scott for being heroic and fuck  _herself_  for thinking they’d save her and Boyd and Cora. Fuck Derek for never giving her a reason to think  _he’d_ save them. Fuck her parents for not noticing something was going on earlier and fuck the cops for not finding her.

Fuck  _everyone_.

~

Haunting probably gets boring really fast anyway. And who says ghosts have to stick around?

So she never got her driver’s license. She can still have a road-trip.

A few buses, trucks, and one convertible later, Erica’s enjoying the benefits of invisibility and intangibility in Las Vegas; free entry to  _all_  the performances. She watches Cirque du Soleil from the audience, and the rafters, and the stage. She finds the best seat in the house for  _Phantom of the Opera_ , but decides not to go backstage, just in case. She sticks her head inside magician’s boxes and learns how the tricks work.

She’s there a few weeks before she leaves the main drag and starts exploring the lesser known streets. On one of them she passes a sandwich board and storefront advertising Psychic Readings!!! and winces a little,  _always thought I was a little bit psychic_  she’d said and grew her claws right into Allison’s leg and-

There’s a sign on the door saying  _out to lunch_.

A block or two later there’s a café with outdoor tables on the sidewalk, and a women stirring sugar into her coffee looks right at Erica. That’s happened a few times before though, and they always turn out to be looking  _past_  her at someone or something else, something alive.

Erica still glances in the direction the woman’s looking though, because why the hell not, and behind her the woman snickers. When she turns around, the woman’s raised one eyebrow, and beckons her over.

“Okay, what the fuck,” Erica says, slumping down into the empty seat across the tiny table. “Was that your shop I passed, with the three exclamation points?”

“They got your attention, didn’t they?” the woman says.

“Whatever.”

“You seem new,” the woman says, ripping open another sugar packet to dump in her coffee. “Died this summer, or in the spring?”

“Summer,” Erica says. “By the way, werewolves are real. Also assholes.”

“Oh, I know,” the woman says, finally sipping her coffee. “How old were you?”

“Sixteen.”

“You’ve got good timing, then,” the woman says, and Erica snorts. “Get yourself up to Ohio and look for a school called Crawford County Day.”

“…what?”

“Trust me,” the woman says, smiling like a cat with a secret. “They take transfer students year-round, but it’s a lot simpler if you get in at the beginning of fall.”

“What the  _fuck_.”

~

Ohio’s never sounded interesting, and Vegas is  _awesome_ , but…why stop travelling? Make it a cross-country road trip. She can always just make Ohio, like, a side-trip on the way to New York.

In Chicago, a man in his nineties spots her trying to pick out the least-crowded bus in the Greyhound station, and says they can fill out her paperwork at the library.

“Post office is right next door,” he adds. “Should beat you there.”

He’s her fifth psychic, and she knows by now that 1) she can’t directly lie to them, and 2) the longer she’s around them, the chattier she feels. Better to keep walking.

He has a medical alert bracelet. She follows him to the library.

~

Erica’s only there a day, but leaving Chicago is a hundred times harder than leaving Las Vegas. At the library, the old man had put his hat on the chair next to him, so no one would sit in Erica. At the bus station, he’d kissed her hand, using the coldness as a guide for her location; all the previous psychics had pretended not to shiver, and accidentally put their elbows or hands through her when gesturing, despite being able to  _see_  her.

She sticks her face out the back window of the bus as it pulls out of the station. He doffs his hat to her, and Erica watches until the bus turns a corner.

~

Crawford County Day is not in Columbus, but Erica had seen the address on the envelope when they mailed her paperwork. She walks to the school, stopping to pet cats on the way. There’s been a few dogs that’ve barked at her, but she can’t touch them, and birds just fly right through her. Cats, though, cats have walked up and  _demanded_  to be petted. It’s a nice change from her werewolf days.

Maybe that should’ve been a clue, that not everything is permeable to her, but it’s still a huge shock to walk smack into the huge wooden doors. There’s not even a  _warning_ , unlike the mountain ash line Stiles had made at the rave, no hiss or crackle or weird vibe. Just  _bam_.

She scowls and backs away, rubbing at her sore forehead and nose. Unfair. What’s she gonna have to do, find an open window? Wait for someone to come by and-

Wait a second.

Flushing, Erica grabs the handle and pulls. The door swings open smoothly, without even a decent creak or gust of eerie wind, to reveal a long hall of dark polished wood.

There’s a helpful map on the wall.

~

In the main office, a girl in a blue tartan skirt, white blouse, and dark blue sweater-vest is sitting on the desk playing with her phone.

Erica glances down at herself; she hasn’t gotten any  _worse_  since dying, but black leather with bloody gashes in it suddenly feels out of place. “Shit.”

The girl on the desk looks up, grins. “You here for fall registration?”

“I guess. My paperwork was supposed to beat me here. Reyes? With an e, not an a.”

The girl hops off the desk and zips around it to rifle through a filing cabinet, skirt swishing. “Oh, yeah, hey, and you qualified for the dorms, too. I’m Leslie, by the way.”

“Erica.”

The grin widens, and the girl holds out her hand. “C’mon, I’ll show you around.”

**Author's Note:**

> Crawford County Day is the sister school to Dalton Academy on Glee. When I was watching both shows, there was a fun magic-meta going around about Dalton being fairyland/the underworld, and it inspired me to write this.  
> So it is technically a crossover about not crossing over.


End file.
